Steam may soon let you hide specific games from your friends

Tired of having to explain yourself every time your friends catch you firing up Hosiery Party: Wet Potato Frenzy on Steam? Well, there's some good news: Valve is reportedly readying a feature that'll let you mark specific games as "private" so you can hide your more unusual tastes from other users while still maintaining a public profile.

At present, Steam's privacy settings don't support the kind of granularity needed to hide individual games, only enabling users to dictate broad categories - game details, friends list, inventory, screenshots, and workshop items - to keep discreet.

As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, however (thanks PC Gamer), Valve is seemingly poised to add a 'mark as private' setting to individual titles, so they can specifically be hidden from the prying eyes of friends. That means you won't have to lock down huge chunks of your profile just to avoid difficult questions about the amount of time you've been playing Coquettish Elbow Reveal VR Edition. Or, in my case, 400 straight hours of Disney Dreamlight Valley.

In less lewd realms, Djundik also reports Valve is working on new parental controls for Steam that'll feature family groups, enabling parents to set daily playtime restrictions or allow their children to request purchases. There's also talk of a redesigned store cart.

As exciting as all this may be, however, it's worth noting none of this is officially confirmed, and may never make it to any kind of public build, beta or otherwise. Still, all being well, you might finally get some peace of mind next time you want to play Partially Exposed Navals 2.